The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature

Abstract

“The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature” studies depictions of religious phenomena in multi-genre texts from across the Americas. Literary engagement with the philosophies and practices of religious and spiritual traditions including Vodou, Kumina, Myal, and Protestant Christianity provide insight into the complex relationships of power that suffuse these literary works. By concentrating on these spiritual practices in the Americas, "The Sacred Act of Reading" affirms the intricate and complex interchange of Afro-diasporic persons, ideas, and discourse across the western hemisphere. The literature studied in this project use religious paradigms to illuminate the physical and metaphysical effects of historical and contemporary systems of socio-political power including slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. By incorporating Euro-centric and African-derived epistemologies throughout this project’s literary analyses, “The Sacred Act of Reading” finds that meaning is always intimately connected to assumptions about authority, recognized subjectivity, and the valuing of human experience. This project adopts an interpretive methodology of “performative textual hermeneutics,” which focuses on the multi-sensory experiences of textual interpretation and creation. Dedicated to “listening” to the wisdom of these literary works, this project finds that the actions and belief systems of readers and audiences are inevitably called into question when exploring the spiritual elements of power.